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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23236003">Grinding Physical Stats</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/TopHat/pseuds/TopHat'>TopHat</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Parahumans Series - Wildbow</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Friendship, Gen, Hero AU, trying to be better, working out</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 13:28:21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>934</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23236003</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/TopHat/pseuds/TopHat</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A day in the gym with Haxx and Maxx, the Protectorate's gaming-themed superhero pair.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>17</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Grinding Physical Stats</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“You can do it! C’mon, one more, one more!”</p><p>Terrance grit his teeth and pulled, arms shaking and muscles burning. Slowly, he lifted his chin up to the bar, neck straining to give him even one more inch of lift. When skin touched metal he began lower. Slowly.</p><p>The burn didn’t mean anything if you weren’t in control.</p><p>“One more! For the PRT!”</p><p>“Fuck you,” Terrance growled. The words worked though, and he reached deep for just enough burn to drag himself up one more time, faster than before, fueled by spite and a maybe-unhealthy determination. This time his arms gave out on the descent, and when his back hit the floor he left them limp. “Fuck you so much.”</p><p>Calvin laughed, the slightly-high and slightly-nervous laugh that meant he wasn’t using his power, and cracked open a water bottle. “You did it, man. Twelve pull-ups. That puts you above the halfway mark for the army, you know.”</p><p>“And maybe at halfway to what you can do,” Terrance mumbled, mustering up enough energy to sit up and take the water bottle. He sipped at it, remembering the advice he’d been given on his first day working out, and eyed the PRT squaddies across the room. An invisible boundary separated the cape half of the gym from the half for normies, and after the initial leering the troopers had more or less gone back to their own exercises. From what Terrance could see that was a lot of running farther than he could, curling more than twice his max, and generally putting on a show of what military fitness looked like.</p><p>“Hey.” Terrance looked up. Calvin had his hand out, a serious expression on his face. “Remember Rule One.”</p><p>“No comparing yourself to anyone else in the gym unless you’re going to ask them out,” Terrance grumbled, taking the offered hand and letting himself get pulled up. “What’s next?”</p><p>Calvin jerked his thumb at the treadmills. “A little more tread time and we’re done for the day, ‘kay?”</p><p>Terrance nodded mutely and staggered over to the exercise machine. Calvin pressed a few buttons, the belt started moving, and all of his air capacity got devoted to trying to keep up.</p><p>He didn’t like exercising. He didn’t like throwing himself into uncomfortable situations, into shit he couldn’t do well, and he sure as hell didn’t like doing it in public. Calvin was there to cover his ass if he fucked up, sure, but every time he failed to complete a workout it felt like taking ten steps back for each inch he dragged himself forward. More than once he’d considered just giving in and magicing up a biotic implant to give himself muscles, to watch as the PRT jocks who lapped him on the track fall behind as brains beat brawn, to show that it didn’t matter how much you worked out because at the end of the day some people were just better.</p><p>Terrance caught the thought, shot it, and upped the speed on his run.</p><p>He’d tried being that person before. He’d tried doing whatever he wanted, lording his new-found power over people, showing it off. Calvin had been more than happy to join him and that had been cool for a while, two nerds against the world. Leet had been the mad scientist, Uber the hypercompetent henchman, and they’d had a good run.</p><p>Then they’d run into a real bad guy and nearly died.</p><p>In his intro to philosophy course, the prof had talked about a guy who said that life was short, nasty, brutish, and cruel. In Terrance's experience, that wasn’t the case. Some people got to coast through their lives on money or looks or brains or whatever the hell they got blessed with. Those people didn’t have nasty, brutish, short, or cruel lives. The rest of the world though, the other ninety nine percent of the population who didn’t have rich parents, good genes, or whatever x-factor which let them just be happy, they needed the Leviathan. Terrance had thought that powers would let him coast, and he’d been proven wrong by a hail of gunfire.</p><p>Now he tried to be better. That meant doing shit he didn’t like or feel comfortable with, like socializing with people other than Calvin or working out or actively trying to expand his bag of tricks ahead of the dozens of other tinkers in New York. It meant swallowing down back-handed compliments when someone showed him up, accepting criticism without snarking back, and being able to lose when he had his ticket punched.</p><p>The belt started slowing down and Terrance felt some tension going out of his shoulders. It was hard, irritating, and he fucked up constantly, but he was making progress. The work-outs were becoming manageable, the co-workers were cooler than he’d first thought, and after he’d started shutting his mouth more during tinkering collaborations his tech’s failure chance had gone down fast. During the last Endbringer fight his teleporter had lasted all the way through, and even after shutting it down he figured it would last another few events. Months later and things were getting better, even if it hadn’t seemed like it in those early weeks.</p><p>His treadmill came to a stop and Terrance stepped off. Calvin was beside him in a moment, a fist extended. “Made all the way through, Haxx. Props.”</p><p>Terrance nodded, smiling as he punched the fist back. “Couldn’t’ve done it without you, Maxx.”</p><p>The two of them went back to the shower room, sweaty, tired, and soon to be a little stronger than they were before.</p>
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